An authorization span is the date range when a payer agrees to cover a given service. It comes with a start date, an end date, and often a limit on visits or units. That sounds bureaucratic, but the impact is very real.
For access and continuity, authorizations shape when care can start and whether it can continue without gaps. In a recent national physician survey, 89 percent of respondents said prior authorization interferes with continuity of care.1 If your team misreads a span or lets it expire quietly, patients wait, or they stop treatment altogether.
For throughput, these dates quietly control how many visits you can realistically complete in a given window. When the span is short, or the team discovers it late in the process, you see compression of appointments, unnecessary rescheduling, and bottlenecks that ripple through your calendar.
For staff workload, the numbers are sobering. Physicians and their staff spend roughly 12 to 14 hours per week on prior authorization tasks, often processing more than 40 requests per physician in that time.2 Every time a visit is documented outside the active span, someone has to chase a fix or write off revenue. That is work that could have been avoided with better visibility into those start and end dates.
In short, the authorization span is not just a line in a payer letter. It is one of the main levers that shapes how smoothly your clinic runs.
Under the jargon, the mechanics are fairly consistent across payers.
First, your team submits a request. That usually includes diagnosis and procedure codes, a description of the planned services, and supporting clinical documentation.
Second, the payer approves or denies. When approved, you receive a specific start date, a specific end date, a maximum volume of visits or units, and sometimes frequency limits, such as a maximum number of visits per week.
Third, every billed service must fall within that window. That means the encounter date has to be on or after the start date and on or before the end date, and your total visits or units cannot exceed what was authorized.
Fourth, spans expire. When you reach the end date, coverage for that authorization stops, even if you still have unused visits. When you hit the visit limit before the end date, the span is effectively exhausted.
Finally, renewals are not automatic. Your team needs to send updated documentation, usually before the span ends, to request a new period of coverage. Some payers will extend an existing authorization, others issue a fresh one with its own dates.
If you think about it as a simple life cycle, request, approve, use within the span, renew or close, it becomes much easier to design workflows around it.
If you wanted to make authorization span management a little less painful starting this month, here is a practical sequence that does not require a full system overhaul.
The point is not perfection by next week. It is a series of small process changes that remove some of the guesswork.
When I interview practice administrators, the pitfalls sound remarkably similar.
One is fragmented communication. Authorization dates live in faxes that billing sees, but schedulers never do. The result is a claim that looks clean on its face but sits outside the active span.
Another is late discovery. Spans are loaded into the system, but nobody reviews what is expiring until denials start to show up. By then, the team is chasing appeals instead of submitting clean renewals.
A third is misalignment with patient behavior. For example, a payer grants a tight span that assumes weekly visits, while the patient reliably cancels every third session. The clinic hits the end date with unused visits and no easy way to recover them. You may also see mismatches between authorizations and other front door processes, such as patient portal software and digital scheduling, if dates are not surfaced in those tools.
Finally, technology gets underused. Many clinics have systems that can centralize messages or track tasks, but staff still lean on personal inboxes and individual reminders. A more connected approach, where a unified inbox and AI intake automation for outpatient facilities capture all pre visit communication, gives you a much better chance of aligning scheduling, documentation, and authorization spans.
What exactly is an authorization span?
It is the time window when a payer agrees to cover a specific service. It includes a start date, an end date, and often a maximum number of visits or units. Services billed outside that window are generally at high risk of denial.
Does the span change the number of visits I get?
The span does not change the total number of visits, it defines when those visits can occur. If you reach the end date with unused visits, you typically need a new authorization. If you use all visits early, you cannot keep billing under that span, even if the end date is still in the future.
Can spans be extended?
Often yes, if medical necessity continues and you submit updated clinical documentation in time. Approval is not guaranteed, and rules vary by payer. It is safer to start that process before the current end date arrives.
Where do I find the official dates?
The most reliable source is the payer’s written or electronic notice, usually in an approval letter, a portal entry, or a fax. Pull those details into your own system instead of relying on staff to re check the portal each time.
How does this relate to claim denials overall?
Claim denials are rising across payers, with some analyses showing nearly one in five claims denied in certain markets and a significant share tied to prior authorization issues.3 Tight control over spans will not eliminate denials, but it removes one preventable category from the list.
If you want more background on how prior authorization affects both clinicians and patients, the American Medical Association’s national survey is a useful primary source.
If you read this and thought, we already know spans are a headache, the question is what to do next, here is a concise plan.
In week one, pick your system of record for authorization dates and require that new approvals land there with start date, end date, and visit limits captured in a consistent way.
In week two, update your scheduling workflow so staff can see those fields in real time and understand when to escalate questions.
In week three, add a recurring review of spans that will expire in the next two to three weeks, and tie renewal work to named owners and a shared task list. If you are already experimenting with tools like healthcare CRM platforms or structured how it works style playbooks for your automation projects, fold authorization spans into that same framework.
In week four, step back and look at your early metrics. Did you catch renewals earlier, did you see fewer preventable denials, did staff feel clearer about who owns what. Adjust from there, and keep iterating. In a world where prior authorization is not disappearing any time soon, a solid handle on authorization spans is one of the most practical levers you have.
